by Glen Duncan
“May I come in?”
“No, you may not.”
He rolled his eyes and began, “Oh come on, Jake, it’s—” then kicked me with high-speed gymnastic accuracy between the legs.
I’ve been good at fighting, in the past. I’ve been dangerous. I know karate, kung-fu, jujitsu, how to kill someone with a Yale key. But you’ve got to keep your hand in, and I haven’t humanly hit anyone for decades. I did what a man does, inhaled, suddenly, through the white light detonation and dropped, first to my knees, then, parts cupped, onto my side, knowing I’d never exhale again. Ellis stepped over me in a draught of damp biker boots and mushroomy foot odour and closed the door. In the power shower, Madeline sneezed. He ignored it, sat on the edge of the bed.
“Jake,” he said. “We want you to know something. Do you know what I’m going to say?”
I didn’t, but responding was out of the question. Everything other than staying curled up holding my balls and inhaling more and more air was out of the question.
“What I’m going to say is: You’re the last. All the resources are dedicated. There’s no one else left. It’s all for you.”
I closed my eyes. It didn’t help. I opened them again. All I wanted was to breathe out but my lungs were annealed. Ellis sat knees apart, elbows on thighs. Behind him the windows were filled with pale cloud against which the snow looked like a fall of ash. History’s given snow new evocation options: ticker-tape parades; Nazi crematoria; World Cup Finals; 9/11 fallout.
“Did you know?” he asked.
I very gently shook my head, no. He gave a dismissive shrug—obviously if I’d known I’d hardly admit it and prove WOCOP had a leak—then bowed his head and rolled his neck as if to ease mastoidal tension. He breathed deeply a couple of times, loosened his shoulders, then straightened, staring at me. “I’m supposed to be the leering villain,” he said. “I can feel it, a sort of narrative coercion in the ether. It’s here in this room, you know, that I should get up and take a piss on you or something.” His fingers were long and knuckly, possessed of the ugly dexterity you see in virtuoso lead guitarists. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I’m not going to. I just felt I wanted to see you before we … you know, come to it. The last hurrah.” He looked out at the snow and said, “Jesus, this weather.” For a few moments we both watched the down-swirling flakes in silence. Then he turned back to me. “To be honest,” he said, “I’m ambivalent about the whole thing. It’s all ambivalence, now, right? Grey areas. Morality reduced to approximations. I know you know this, Jake, that everyone’s more or less okay, all things considered. Look at this guy whatsizname, Fritzl, raping his daughter in the cellar for years. We don’t mind him, really. We know there’ll be psychology, we know there’ll be causes. It’s shock-fatigue. Beyond good and evil.”
In the shower Madeline adjusted the jet option to “massage” and let out a gasp. It occurred to me that Ellis was on drugs. His face was damp.
“We fluked it, you know,” he said. “Finding you. An agent from France came over following a suspect, turns out the suspect was following you. We thought you were still in Paris.”
At the absolute top of my held breath I said very quickly: “Why didn’t the agent kill me?”
“Come on, Jake. You’re Strictly Grainer. You know that. All the Hunt knows it, all WOCOP. It’s like one of the Five Pillars.”
The pain was diversifying: stabbings in the abdomen; a dark red headache; something devious and knifey in the colon; the need to vomit. I got up on one elbow and released a burp, which felt like a little miracle.
“I won’t lie to you,” Ellis said. “I’ll be sorry to see you go. I don’t like endings, not on this scale, not of an era.” One of Madeline’s stockings lay next to his hand. He fingered it, idly, with his awful white asparagus digits, seemed for the first time to be reconstructing my night. It was irrelevant to him. I remembered Harley’s description of him: magnificently abstracted, carries with him an inscrutable scheme of things next to which your own feels paltry. You have to remind yourself it’s just because he’s half insane. “There’s a literary anticlimax available,” Ellis continued, discarding the stocking. “You and Grainer come face-to-face and he realises that killing you will take away his purpose, his identity, so he lets you live. I’ve discussed it with him. He didn’t dismiss it straight away.”
I’d been exploring positional alternatives while he spoke and had ended up (again I say God being dead, irony still rollickingly alive) in exactly the attitude Madeline had adopted last night for receipt of buggery. Humour lightens. “But he did dismiss it,” I helium-squeaked.
“He did dismiss it. He considered it, he weighed it, he dismissed it. Filial honour trumps all.”
Filial honour. Forty years ago I killed and ate Grainer’s father. Grainer was ten at the time. There’s always someone’s father, someone’s mother, someone’s wife, someone’s son. This is the problem with killing and eating people. One of the problems.
“That’s a shame,” I wheezed. Ellis didn’t laugh. (He doesn’t laugh, Harley had told me. It’s not that he doesn’t get it. It’s that amusement no longer makes him laugh. He’s transcended too much.)
“I agree,” Ellis said. “It’s a goddamned crying shame. But unfortunately it’s not my decision.”
With monumental belatedness I wondered what he was doing here, manifestly not putting a silver bullet in my brain or lopping off my head. The question troubled me, my other self, the one that wasn’t filling with joy at having just managed to breathe out slightly.
Someone knocked. “That’ll be your breakfast,” Ellis said. “I’ll leave you to it.” He got up and, stepping over me again, opened the door. I heard him say: “Take it in, would you?” Then he was gone.
A young hair-gelled man in Zetter livery entered with Madeline’s Full English on an enormous tray.
“Cramp,” I gasped. “I’m fine. Just put it on the bed.”
8
HARLEY’S PHONE WAS off when I called him, which meant he was either at the WOCOP offices or dead. I couldn’t shuck the conviction they were onto him. An hour after Madeline’s departure (I spent the bulk of breakfast nursing my keening plums on the bed while she ate—with meticulous greed, since she allows herself only one fry-up a month) I’d arrived at the conclusion that Ellis’s visit was simply to reinforce the story of how they’d found me. The man’s mental style—oblique, tangential, possibly stoned—made him hard to read but there was surely something hokey about the way he’d volunteered that We fluked it, you know, finding you. The only motive that made sense was WOCOP’s desire to preserve the illusion that Harley’s cover was intact. Which meant it wasn’t.
I passed the afternoon supine with a cold flannel pressed to my forehead, tracking my gonads’ slow return to quiescence, CNN on the plasma screen for the lulling white noise of the news. I’m immune to news, the news, breaking news, rolling news, news flashes. Live long enough and nothing is news. “The News” is “the new things.” That’s fine, until a hundred years go by and you realise there are no new things, only deep structures and cycles that repeat themselves through different period details. I’m with Yeats and his gyres. Even The News knows there’s no real news, and goes to ever greater lengths to impart urgent novelty to its content. Have Your Say, that’s the latest inanity, newscasters reading out viewer emails: “And Steve in Birkenhead writes: ‘Our immigration laws are the laughing stock of the world. This is the Feed the World mentality gone mad …’ ” I can think back to a time when something like this would have annoyed or at least amused me, that the democracy Westerners truly got excited about was the one that made every blogging berk a critic and every frothing fascist a political pundit. But now I feel nothing, just quiet separation. In fact the news already feels postapocalyptically redundant to me, as if (silent dunes outside, insects the size of cars) I’m sitting in one of the billions of empty homes watching video footage of all the stuff that used to matter, wondering how anyone ever thought it did.
“I had a visitor,” I told Harley from the Zetter’s bar, when, after eight in the evening, I got through to him at last. “Ellis was here this morning.”
“I heard,” he said. “I’m not surprised. Hunt consensus is you need your nose rubbed in it.”
“That’s not what worries me. It played as an effort to deliver the official ‘how we found you’ story. Which means that’s not how they found me.”
“Jake, no. You’re being paranoid. I spoke to the French chap myself.”
“What?”
“The twit with the Magnum. Cloquet. They brought him in for questioning. I was there during the interrogation. He was following you. Had been following you for a week in Paris.”
I sipped my Scotch. The bar was low-lit, dark tones and soft furnishings, a carefully designed atmosphere of deserved indulgence. The long white calves of a moody brunette sitting with one leg crossed over the other on a high stool opposite me offered a momentary distraction. She was doodling in her cocktail with a straw. In the film version I’d go over and open with a gambit of jaded brilliance. Only in films is a woman alone at a bar actually a woman alone at a bar. The thought added itself to the mental racket I was sick of. Every Hollywood movie now is part of the index of Western exhaustion. I had a vision of my death like a lone menhir in an empty landscape. You just walked towards it. Simple as that. The peace of wrapping your arms around cold stone. Peace at last.
“What for?” I asked.
I heard the shick of Harley’s malachite Zippo and his first intemperate drag. “That’s what we’re not clear on,” he said. “He claims he’s a free agent with a grudge against werewolves, but he’s been fornicating with Jacqueline Delon for the last year so it can’t be that simple. Trouble is he’s somewhat gaga. High as a kite when we picked him up. Farrell told me he’d enough coke on him to get a horse airborne. My guess is even cleaned up he’s borderline psychotic. In any case Madame Delon’s the last person to be ordering a hit on a werewolf. She loves you lot.” He caught himself. “Sorry, sorry, sorry. Bad choice of words.”
“Forget it,” I said. I sniffed my Scotch. It was supposed to be Oban but it didn’t taste right. “What about the WOCOP agent tracking him? Did you talk to him?”
“Broussard,” Harley said. “He’s back in France. I didn’t speak to him, but Farrell did. Story confirmed: He was keeping an eye on Cloquet, went out of his jurisdiction, realised Cloquet was tailing you, and rather sheepishly called us in. Jake, seriously, stop worrying. I’m fine. We’re fine. No one knows.”
I’d left my room to call Harley in case Ellis had planted a bug I’d been unable to find, though I’d spent two hours looking. Perhaps I was being paranoid. Either way I felt tired, suddenly, weighed down again by the saddlebags of ifs and thens, the swag of dead currency. There’s an inner stink comes up at times of all the meat and blood that’s passed down my gullet, the offal I’ve buried my snout in, the guts I’ve rummaged and gorged on. Harley’s crispness reminded me we weren’t seeing this the same way.
“Okay, listen,” he said, as if with clairvoyance. “We’ve got to get you sorted. It’s going to take me a week, maybe ten days to get a solid out in place. That’s lousy, I know, but in this climate everything’s got to be quadruple-checked. I’m thinking—”
“Harley, stop.”
“Jake, I’m not going to keep having this argument.”
“Funny, isn’t it, how now that it’s come to this we both always knew it would come to this?”
“Please don’t.”
One develops an instinct for letting silence do the heavy lifting. In the three, four, five seconds that passed without either of us speaking, the many ways the conversation could go came and went like time-lapse film of flowers blooming and dying. When it was over all the relevant information was in. Paradoxically, it renewed our licence to pretend.
“Fuck you, Jake,” Harley said. “This is how it’s going to work. I’m getting you an out anyway. If you’re still bent on this absurd suicidal melodrama when the time comes then you needn’t avail yourself of it. But it’ll be there. It’ll be there.”
Pity and irritation curdled, gave me an inkling of the energy I’d need to fight him. Well, let be. He needed this for himself. I was secondary. This is what I’ve reduced him to: a human whose raison d’être is keeping a werewolf alive.
“Okay,” I said.
“I should bloody well think so.”
“Okay I said.”
“Well, for God’s sake. Why do you keep sniffing, by the way?”
“I ordered Oban. I think they’ve given me Laphroaig.”
“The crosses you bear, Jake. You ought to get an award.”
We discussed immediate logistics. Naturally the Zetter was being watched. WOCOP had tried to get an agent in but an international pharmaceutical sales conference had started today and the hotel was full, would be for the next forty-eight hours. The manager knew me and could be trusted to run light interference but staff would be susceptible to bribes. We had to assume my movements were marked.
“Which suits us,” Harley said.
“Because?”
“Because you’re getting out of the city tomorrow and surveillance is going with you. I can’t set up an out with the whole organisation watching London. I’m good, but I’m not God. I need their attention elsewhere.”
This is how it is: You come alert, wait, feel a piece fall into place, know the joy of aesthetic inevitability. I said: “Fine.”
“What, no tantrum?”
“There’s something I need to do. I’ll want peace and quiet. Do you care where I go?”
“What do you need to do?”
I don’t tell that part of the story. She’d looked into my eyes and said, It’s you. It’s you.
“Set the record straight,” I said. “Does Cornwall give you enough room to manoeuvre?”
“Cornwall’s what I was thinking.”
“We should change phones again.”
“No time. Have to trust to luck.”
“I don’t even know if the trains are running.”
“Every hour from Paddington or Waterloo. There’s a four-by-four booked for you at the Alamo office in St. Ives. Use the Tom Carlyle ID. There’s something else you should know.”
“What?”
“Someone hit one of Mubarak’s places in Cairo three months back. Guards neutralised with rapid-acting tranx. No forced entry, an inside job.”
Housani Mubarak, Eyptian dealer in stolen antiquities. At one time or another half the Middle Eastern market’s passed through his hands.
“Point is,” Harley continued, “they left everything in place. Took one small box of worthless crap formerly of the Iraq Museum in Baghdad. Mubarak’s in a state. Can’t get past the fact there was nothing valuable in the box.”
“So what was in the box?”
“Quinn’s book.”
For a moment I didn’t speak. Suffered a second dreary surge of pity and irritation. Painful to see how far Harley was willing to reach. “Harls,” I said, gently. “Please don’t be ludicrous.”
Quinn’s book, if it ever existed, was the journal of Alexander Quinn, a nineteenth-century archaeologist who had, in Mesopotamia in 1863, allegedly stumbled on the story of the authentic origin of werewolves and written it down in his diary. “Allegedly” being the key word. Neither Quinn nor his book made it out of the desert. A hundred years ago tracking this document down had been an idiotic obsession of mine. Now we might as well have been talking about Father Christmas or the Tooth Fairy.
“I’m just telling you,” Harley said. “It’s a possibility. You’ve never been the only one looking for it.”
“I’m not looking for it. I haven’t been looking for it for years. I don’t care about any of that stuff anymore.”
“Right. You don’t want to know how it all started. You don’t want to know what it all means.”
“I already know what it all means.”
“What?”
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“Nothing.”
Silence again. The bulging insistence of the real and Harley’s palpable effort to ignore it. This was how it would be between now and the end, him covering his eyes and stopping his ears and holding in the words until it was absolutely beyond denial that we were at the end. And then what? What could he say to me except Good-bye? Or I to him except Sorry? Sadness went through me like a muscle relaxant. So many moments bring me to the conclusion I don’t want any more moments.
“Call me when you get to Cornwall,” he said, then hung up.
9
A MILE FROM the village of Zennor, south of the promontory known as Gunard’s Head, the Cornish coast concertinas in a series of narrow coves and jagged inlets. The beaches—it’s a stretch to call them beaches—are shingle and stone and even a full day of sun leaves them literally and figuratively cold. The onyxy water would be mildly amused by you drowning in it. Local teenagers stymied into near autism or restless violence come here and drink and smoke and make fires and work with numb yearning through the calculus of fornication. The rocks go up steeply on either side.
“The Pines” is a tall house overlooking one of these coves, backed by a hill of coniferous woodland that gives it its name. It sits at the seaward end of a deep valley, accessed by a dirt track (no through route) down from the B road that links the coastal villages for ten miles in each direction. A former cattle farm, now equestrian centre, lies a mile inland, and the nearest domestic household is out of eye- and earshot on the other side of the woods where the track leaves the road.